Blood Games (43 page)

37

John Taylor had to wait nearly ten minutes at the outdoor phone for Lewis Young to answer his page and call him back. He told Young to expect the call from Crone’s wife and let him know that they were at Wendy’s, near the campus, talking with one of Moog’s friends. Young said he would meet them there and they all could go out for dinner and discuss the case.

As Taylor started through the doorway back into Wendy’s, he met Crone coming out.

“Come back out here a minute,” Crone said.

Taylor stepped outside, waiting to hear what the chief had to say.

“Neal wants to talk.”

“Chief, don’t mess with me,” Taylor said, looking at him skeptically. “What the hell you talking about?”

Crone was smiling broadly. “He says he’s going to lay the whole thing out for us.”

Both Crone and Taylor were dying to know what Neal had to tell them. Did he just know something about the murder? Had he taken part? Neither could picture this lumpish, lethargic boy killing somebody. But they wanted to be especially cautious about doing everything just right so that the case wouldn’t later be lost on some technicality. They didn’t want Neal to say anything about the case until they had further instructions from the DA.

Neal checked out of work and joined the two officers outside, where they stood by picnic tables awaiting Young’s arrival.

“I can’t wait to hear what you’ve got to say,” Taylor told Neal, whose own curiosity also was aroused.

“How did you know that Chris was involved?” he asked.

“We can’t talk about that right now,” Crone said.

Young arrived, expecting only to have to make a decision about where to have dinner, discovering instead that the case he’d been working on for nearly a year was on the brink of solution. He called to Washington to let the district attorney know that he was needed.

Crone and Taylor drove Neal to his apartment so that he could change clothes, then took him to a seafood restaurant, where they met Young. The situation was awkward for the officers. The only thing that they had in common with Neal was the murder, and that was the one thing they couldn’t talk about. They talked about anything else instead, TV, sports, music, the weather. Minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness.

Shortly after six, just as they were getting ready to leave the restaurant for SBI headquarters, Young’s pager beeped. He went to find a telephone and returned looking dejected.

The district attorney, Mitchell Norton, was just leaving Washington.

Here was the biggest case Beaufort County had had in years. Crone, Taylor, and Young were waiting with a solution within their grasp. The officers had assumed that the DA would drop everything to come to their assistance. Now they would have to nursemaid Neal for another two hours or more while he pondered whether or not he was making a mistake, two more hours during which he could change his mind, tell them that he didn’t know a thing and walk away. They would be helpless to stop him.

It was after nine when Norton finally arrived with his assistant, Keith Mason. They strode into SBI headquarters and walked straight up to Young.

“What does the boy want to do?” Norton asked.

“You need to talk to the chief,” said Young.

“What does he know?” Norton persisted, ignoring Crone, who stood by silently, miffed that the DA would assume that only the SBI could have broken the case, never the dummies in the Washington Police Department.

“I haven’t talked to him,” Young said. “He talked to the chief.”

Crone finally stepped in and told the two DAs what had taken place.

“We can’t make any deals,” Norton said abruptly. “We’re not going to talk to him.”

The officers had been waiting five hours with a young man willing to tell them about a murder and the DA wasn’t going to talk to him? He reminded the DA that they had gone to Bonnie’s attorney with the evidence against Chris, certainly offering the implication of a deal.

That was different, the DA said. If he or Mason talked with Neal, they could become witnesses and be required to testify. If they offered a deal in advance, then any evidence that came from Neal would be tainted, perhaps conceived as being contrived for the promise of reward.

“Well, at least go tell him that you can’t talk to him,” Crone finally said in exasperation.

Neal could see the officers talking with the DAs, and as the conversation dragged on, he became more and more nervous.

“What are they talking about?” he asked Taylor.

“Oh, they’re just filling them in on what has happened so far,” Taylor said, trying to calm him.

Finally, Norton agreed to let Mason explain the situation to Neal. The two gathered with the three officers in a conference room. Mason said that no deals could be made. There would be no offer of leniency. If Neal had been involved, he would be charged with murder. If he wanted to talk, he had to understand that.

Taylor and Young could see their case slipping away. They began scrambling to convince Neal that he should talk anyway.

“You have to trust us,” Taylor said. “I know you’ve only just met us, you don’t know us, but you have to believe that we’ll look out for you. We’ll do what we can.”

As the officers pleaded, Neal grew more solemn and dejected. Before the arrival of the DAs, he had seemed hopeful, optimistic. At one point he’d even mentioned to Crone that he’d heard about a reward and asked if he might have some chance at claiming it. “Don’t press your luck,” the chief had told him. Now Neal was slumping in his chair, visibly depressed.

Crone quietly interrupted. “Why don’t you guys all go out for a minute,” he said to Taylor, Young, and Mason.

They looked at him as if asking, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

He nodded and they left.

After the door was closed, Crone turned to Neal and said, “Do you understand why we can’t make any deals, any promises?”

“Yeah, I understand,” he said.

“You told me at Wendy’s that you wanted to get this off your back. There’s only one way you’re going to do that, and you know what that is.”

“I know.”

Crone knew that Neal had to be considering the direness of the consequences if he chose to talk.

“I’ve got a son about your age,” Crone said. “If you were my son, I’d tell you to do the right thing.”

“Well, I guess there’s still some hope,” Neal said, making an attempt at a smile.

“Are you going to give us a statement?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to talk with me, or with one of the other officers, or with all of us?”

“I’d rather just talk with you.”

“Would you mind if John Taylor came in and took some notes?”

“No, I guess not.”

“He’s going to talk to us,” Crone said when he went back out to the others, “but right now he only wants to talk with me and John.”

As eager as he was to hear what Neal had to say, Crone was still anxious about his wife. He was supposed to meet her in Raleigh hours earlier. She hadn’t called recently, and he had no idea where she was now. He needed to call his in-laws to find out if they had heard from her, but first he had to hear Neal out.

After waiving his rights, Neal told Crone that Chris and James had come to him a few days before the murder with a plan for Chris to get his inheritance early by killing his parents. He thought the idea was incredible, but he went along with it because his only role was to drive James to Washington to commit the murders. Chris drew a map directing them to his house. Neal said that he drove James there, let him out near the house, and waited nearby until James reappeared, saying he’d done it. James was supposed to steal jewelry to make it look like a robbery, but he only had taken a little money. They drove back to Raleigh, stopping along a deserted road on the way so that James could pile up the clothes he’d been wearing and bum them.

The story fit the evidence. It was highly unlikely that Neal could have learned about the fire and the map without being part of the plot. Crone had no doubt that he was telling the truth, but he felt a strange sort of letdown.

“Is that it?” he asked, a little incredulously, when Neal had finished.

“That’s it,” Neal said with a shrug.

“It didn’t have anything to do with Dungeons and Dragons?”

Nothing, said Neal.

After their long investigation, all the plodding hours of searching and questioning, all their elaborate theorizing, it all was so simple. Motive and method were as ancient as murder. The motive: greed. The method: a key, a club, a blade.

Crone wanted to hear more, but his wife came first. He had to go find her. Would Neal mind if Lewis Young, who’d worked the case from the beginning, came in to get the details? Fine, said Neal, and for the next five hours he told Young and Taylor everything that he could remember about the murder.

A week or so before the murder, Neal said, Chris and James had gone to Washington together to kill Chris’s parents. He’d heard them talking about it, but he knew no details. They had talked of putting Chris’s family to sleep with sleeping pills before killing them, but they had chickened out because Chris decided it would be better for him not to be at home when the murders occurred.

At some point before the weekend of the actual murder—Neal couldn’t remember the date—Chris and James had come by the apartment on Ligon Street that he shared with Butch Mitchell. They came about noon. Only the three of them were there. At first they chatted about things in general. Then James said that they had come up with a plan for Chris to get his inheritance early, a plan for murder. Was Neal interested? Neal did not want his friends to think that he was too timid or cowardly for such a bold adventure. Sure, he said.

James did most of the talking. He would carry out the actual killing. Neal’s job would be to drive Chris’s car. James had no license and didn’t want to take a chance on blowing the whole mission by being stopped for a traffic violation. Neal would be paid for driving, but he wasn’t sure whether the amount was to be $2,000 or $20,000.

Only Chris’s parents were to be slain. No mention was made of killing Chris’s sister, Angela. Chris said that he would be willing to share the inheritance with her. That inheritance, Neal believed, was about $10 million. He had been told that earlier, although he wasn’t sure whether it was Chris or James who had told him. He had no idea how much James was to receive for the killing.

Chris sketched two maps on a white legal pad. One showed how to skirt the northern edge of Washington to reach his neighborhood. The other was a map of Smallwood that identified the Von Stein house, showed where James was to be let out at a wooded lot behind the house, marked a spot where Neal could park near a utility substation, even pointed out the locations of nearby dogs that might bark and cause alarm. Once in Smallwood, Neal was to drive only on back streets, because neighbors might recognize the sound of the loud mufflers on Chris’s car.

James was to enter the Von Stein house through the back door with a key that Chris would provide. He was to take jewelry from a kitchen cabinet and make the killings appear to be related to a burglary.

Chris was to stay in Raleigh while the murders were taking place, making certain that he was seen by others, so he would have an alibi. If Chris received a call about the murders before Neal and James got back to Raleigh with his car, he would claim to have lost his car keys as an excuse for not being able to drive immediately to Washington.

Before leaving that day, Neal said, Chris told him that his parents were about to disinherit him because he was fucking up and flunking out of school. They were on the verge of cutting off his funds for school, Chris said, and if this plan didn’t come off, he might have to find a job and go to work.

A couple of days later, Neal said, he went by James’s dorm room. Chris was there and they again talked about the plan, although no mention still was made about how the killing would be done. Chris said that after the murders, he would have to appear distraught and depressed. The way he would come out of his depression, he said, was to go to the beach and buy cars for all of his friends.

Three or four days after that chance encounter, Neal said, he again stopped by James’s room. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he thought that it was on this occasion that he found James putting black paste shoe polish on a pair of white batting gloves and on a wooden baseball bat that he had seen previously in James’s room. The bat had a line of triangles drawn around it in ink, just above the trademark. The question-mark-like symbol of a rock group called the Blue Oyster Cult had been sketched on the fat end of the bat. The handle was wrapped with black friction tape. James also showed him a new hunting knife. He and Chris had bought it for the job, James told him, but Neal couldn’t remember whether he said they’d bought it at Kmart or the flea market. The knife was only for backup, James said. He planned to “take out” Chris’s parents with the bat.

“One good blow on each ought to do it,” James said, taking a hearty swing.

It was on this visit that James asked about his work schedule, Neal said, and he thought they may have set a date for the mission then.

Anyway, no more than three days later, James came to his apartment in the morning, gave him the keys to Chris’s car, and told him to meet him in the fringe parking lot on Sullivan Drive behind Lee dorm that night between 11:30 and 12:30.